by Christophe Becker

“Ich war Prinz in diesem Land. Alle anderen mussten vor mich auf den Boden blicken, und niemand durfte mir in die Augen sehen, aber nun bin ich in Ketten, wie mein Volk. Jetzt muss ich auf den Boden schauen.”

[“I was a prince in this country. Everyone else had to look at the ground in front of me and no one was allowed to look me in the eyes, but now I am in chains, like my people. Now I have to look at the floor.”]

Werner Herzog, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972

Christophe Becker: Last time we talked you mentioned your travels across Central and South America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico. Now you’ve just come back from Mexico-City where you did a reading of William Burroughs’ Queer for the 110th anniversary of his birth in St. Louis, Missouri.

Klaus Maeck: Well, I decided to flee the cold and the snow in Hamburg and spend the 3 months of winter in Mexico City. But I knew I needed to do something there instead of simply being a tourist and hanging around. I wanted to organize some screenings. My idea was to present a series of Burroughs films in the area where he lived in the early 1950s, in Colonia Roma. Besides my own films Decoder and Commissioner of Sewers, both starring Burroughs, I was keen to show Beat by Gary Walkow [2000], a film about the visit of Allen Ginsberg and others who left for CDMX (Mexico City), starring Kiefer Sutherland [as William S. Burroughs] and Courtney Love [as Joan Vollmer]. It’s a little-known film, I only knew it from some bad Japanese pirate internet stream. Ginsberg and his friends didn’t run into Burroughs since he’d gone to South America with a young lover at the time, they met with his wife Joan and went together on a trip. Other films I wanted to present were Drugstore Cowboy [Gus Van Sant, 1989], Naked Lunch [David Cronenberg, 1991], William S. Burroughs: A Man Within [Yoni Leyser, 2010], and Burroughs: The Movie, the documentary by Howard Brookner [1983].

Burroughs’ birthday on the 5th of February was a welcome date since the press always needs some distinctive reason to publicize. Besides the films I wanted to do something in the legendary Bounty Bar where Burroughs used to drink with his friends and where he met that young American with whom he travelled to South America searching for Yage — the psychoactive drug also known as ayahuasca. Well, it’s also the house where he accidentally shot his wife in an apartment right above the bar.

I was in CDMX the year before, just for a few days. I went to that building which is now a modest restaurant named Krika’s. [Monterrey 207 Esq Chihuahua Roma Nte, Cuauhtemoc, Mexico City.] I spoke to the owner and asked if he minded me organizing an event there. On the marquee was stenciled: “El lugar de la Leyenda,” “the place of the legend.” He also had some pictures of Burroughs inside. But before I resolved to do anything there I wrote James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ secretary, asking if he believed it was stupid to actually choose this location — because of that tragic incident. The answer was a straight “yes.” Oops. Plus, James informed me that the restaurant is not exactly where the Bounty Bar was. It was really next door, and is now a print shop. Almost no one knew about this. Okay, I get it… However, during the Cut-Ups@2023 event in Paris [12-15 Sept. 2023] I’d told some other Burroughsians about my idea and they’d all said “Go for it! Do it anyway!”

So, when I went back to Mexico, I checked with the owner if he was up for it, not showing films there but doing a reading of Queer, the novel that unfolded from the Bounty Bar — and of course he liked it, as it meant promoting the place. However, I did make plain to the small audience that the restaurant was not the original location.

C. B.: There are two German words: fernweh [marrying the words fern, or distance, and wehe, an ache or sickness, the word can be roughly translated as “distance sickening” or “far woe” — a pain to see far-flung places beyond our doorstep. Think of it as the opposite of heimweh (homesickness). It’s an ache many of us have felt but hitherto we didn’t have a word to describe it.” in David Farley, “The travel ‘ache’ you can’t translate,” BBC.com, 24 March 2020.], not to be confused with wanderlust if memory serves. Which one was it, do you figure?

K. M.: What can I say — both? For a long time I dreamt of spending the winters in that country since I love it so much. The spectacular countryside and coastlines, the spectacular history and traditions, the relaxed way of life… and finally, since I stopped making films, I could afford to leave the cold gray wet Tiefebene of Norddeutschland at least for one winter.

C. B.: Are you seriously telling me you’re done with films?

K. M.: Well, yes… for the films I would like to produce you not only need a large professional team but also hard cash. Suppose you have all that and decide to spend your next 3-5 years on that new film, going through all the funding hassle and development, adjusting your ideas to please investors and audiences before you actually start shooting — obviously the most exciting part as well as editing. But, even if you have an enthusiastic distributor who puts cash into advertising, the potential audiences are shrinking alarmingly. Only few people still go to cinemas these days, it’s quite frustrating, but cinema is dying. There are new formats, especially streaming platforms, but they are solely looking for commercial productions, same goes for television. Outside this framework filmmaking seems more like an expensive hobby and yes, I am tired of that.

C. B. : Among the many countries Burroughs decided to settle in, Mexico probably was the only one he didn’t truly select. It was a last resort solution after he killed Joan Vollmer on September 6, 1951.

K. M.: Well, Burroughs and his wife actually went to Mexico City because he had legal problems in the US. He was on and off drugs, as was his wife Joan, and both were quite heavily drunk and stoned as they had the fatal idea to play a William Tell game in the friend’s apartment where they were partying. So it obviously was an ambivalent decision to do something there… but I made up my mind as the Bounty Bar downstairs was the place where he fell in love with the young American Lewis Marker, named Allerton in the novel. Burroughs wrote about this love affair and their trip to Latin America when he was still living in Mexico in the early 50’s, although it was only published in 1985, with some lively descriptions of the wild nightlife. Much of it was composed while he was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide. Another driving force to settle for that place was Burroughs’ confession that Mexico City and the shooting of his wife actually caused him to seriously start writing, as he stated later in a foreword to Queer. Plus, the novel was just being adapted by film director Luca Guadagnino for a feature film with Daniel Craig which should be released later this year. To be honest I don’t expect too much of that… and sadly enough the first film adaption planned by Steve Buscemi some years ago did not work out.

Well, I did find a nice arthouse cinema in Colonia Roma, the Cine Tonalá, but in the end I could only show my own films and the documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within since I knew and asked the director Yoni Leyser for permission. The cinema was not ready to ask for screening rights for the other films as they were all distributed by major film companies.

The screenings went quite well, especially Decoder, much to my surprise… A band called Virgen Siamesa had designed a crossover between the Decoder logo and the Psychic TV logo — the latter we adapted ourselves for Decoder, since our street pirates and their leader were a spoof of the Temple ov Psychick Youth. I was utterly surprised to find young people who were familiar with the film as it wasn’t available in the country and was never shown in Latin America until my own trip to Mexico.

C. B. : Luca Guadagnino directed a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria that I found surprisingly interesting. He voluntarily erased the profound misogyny and / or homophobia present throughout Argento’s movies to put together a more “feminist” version (for lack of a better word). The fact that he and (script-writer) David Kajganich are homosexual might have had an effect on the script. I was thinking about it because both Bertrand Mandico and David Cronenberg had problems adapting Burroughs’ problematic view of women.

K. M.: I am not familiar with Guadagnino’s films and I am curious to see his adaptation of Queer.

C. B. : I was surprised by the choice you made of reading Queer. Unlike most of Burroughs’ texts you typically refer to (from Naked Lunch to The Electronic Revolution), the novel can be seen as fairly formal. Do you consider Burroughs’ work as a whole, or, like a certain number of critics, do you divide it into two distinct parts? An orthodox Burroughs, preceding an experimental Burroughs?

K. M.: I never thought that way, no. However, my fascination and admiration for this man only started after I read his essays, interviews and manuals (The Electronic Revolution for instance) — his preoccupation with mystical and occult themes, also with mafia politics and the power of mass media. His tone is always wonderfully irreverent and radical, wrapped in subversive black humor. But his novels also amazed me from the very beginning — the power of language that his stories convey, although his unconventional writing style leaves so much open — or perhaps precisely because of this. The images, smells and feelings squeeze out between the lines and jump out at me, even his fragmentary texts without much plot leave bizarrely powerful impressions.

But to be honest, I was also happy when the plot wasn’t whizzing through time and space, wasn’t quite so fragmented and coded and therefore naturally much easier to read — as in the Red Night Trilogy or in Queer especially, where he tells a very personal story that contains many references to his later work.

But for this anniversary event in Mexico, Queer was chosen simply because the true story behind the novel took place right there. Even though the Bounty Bar has not been around for a long time, I found it exciting to present this story in the place where it originated.

C. B. : How did you choose the passages to read?

K. M.: To begin with I chose an excerpt of that introduction Burroughs wrote for a later edition of Queer — what he loved about Mexico City in the 50’s and where he mentioned the tragic shooting of his wife and what it did to him. In my own foreword to the reading I made clear that we were celebrating his novel and the place where it was born, not the spectacle of the killing. From the novel I chose passages where Burroughs described his visits to the Bounty Bar and his first encounters with Allerton, the developing of their strange love affair until his return to the city — alone.

I found two Mexican actors for the reading, Ignacio Velasco and Fernando Yacamán, and I compiled some video footage from Mexico City in the 50’s plus some authentic photos of Burroughs and Lewis Marker in Mexico which were screened in the background. The reading was not well attended, but we had a great time…

C. B. : You were interviewed by journalist Hernán Muleiro for La Jornada. The journalist talked about la “Guerra de los ruidos” (the war of noises). The very first version of Decoder I saw was subtitled in Spanish, I was wondering if, maybe, the movie had had an unusual impact on the Spanish-speaking world…?

K. M.: You saw a Spanish subtitled version? I thought the Mexicans were the first ones to do Spanish subtitles… well, I don’t think the rather poor dialogue makes a big impression, it is rather the authentic images, the unusual edit and the spirit of the time that appeal to a young generation, no matter the part of the world.

And yes, the “war of noises” still is one of my favorite topics… there are crazy findings if you research how and where music is or can be used as a weapon!

C. B. : In that very same interview you mentioned the danger of Spotify and its algorithms.

K. M.: Well, I found it alarming when I studied their marketing strategies. For their advertisers they claim: “At Spotify, we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors without filters!” And that’s just the number of premium users worldwide, the total number of users is more than twice as high (as of 2022, old figures by now!). What makes Spotify unique within the larger platform economy is that they have vast amounts of data related to our emotional states, moods and feelings, billions of data points every day. This data forms the basis for Spotify’s massive streaming intelligence: Spotify can track your every habit and mood. When they combine this with the psychographic data about you that they can access from the other major players — Facebook, Instagram — their streaming intelligence will be the greatest of all. One of Spotify’s senior business developers said in an interview: “What we ultimately want to do is to be able to predict people’s behavior through music.” Back in 2018, they filed a patent for “Methods and systems for personalizing user experiences based on personality traits.” Whether such applications are carried out within the strict boundaries of ethical guidelines on data use, collection and storage is highly doubtful, don’t you think?

By the way, Spotify used part of its gigantic profit made with music, namely more than 100 million euros, to invest in an AI start-up in 2021. The company Helsing plans to use artificial intelligence to support the military in the assessment of battlefields. In addition to aerial surveillance by military drones, not only sensors and special cameras are used on the ground, but also automated software that enables customers to make faster decisions. So far, their technology has been sold to the French, British and German military, as well as to the European Union, which, to give an example, naturally uses it to better prevent refugees from entering the country.

C. B. : Many programs have recently been developed, mostly AI, including AI music generators that use already existing material. Is it that different from Burroughs’ will to “loot the Louvre” and “steal anything in sight”?

K. M.: Well, in the end it’s a program stealing. It is different because a program can never be a creative artist whose ideas stem from a very individual and personal experience. It can be programmed to steal and compile it in a certain way, even by chance like a random cut-up, but the personal expression will always be missing, don’t you think?

I recently had a script written by ChatGPT, as a test. I added a book to my prompt that I think might make a good film and asked for a 90-minute script. In no time at all I had a well-structured but totally conventional script. The AI learns from successful films, I suppose, so there’s no room for artistic experiments that ultimately make a film special. The AI can do some of the work for me by suggesting a structure, a dramaturgy or certain scenes, but it can only become something unique with my creative input. Now, of course, this only applies to the weird films I would like to make — not to blockbusters.

Regarding music, I love mashups! They emerged in the 80s, songs in which a musical collage of pieces from different artists is mixed together by sampling. I am waiting for more. But what can I tell you as a long-standing music publisher? Knowing the economic situation of so many talented artists, more precisely creators of art, be it music or literature or painting, I am very much in favor of fair remuneration for their work and have long campaigned for it.

Well, copy right or copy wrong? My second self, the artist, still grins and nods when he hears the Burroughs quote!

C. B. : In 2023, Paul McCartney told BBC Radio 4 that “artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song,” adding the technology was used “to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo.” What to do you make of it, considering McCartney was largely influenced by Burroughs’ cut-up technique and Ian Sommerville’s sound experiments?

K. M.: I think that Paul simply tested the new technology in order to create a new/old song to the legendary library and make some more money.

C. B. : What about your projects?

K. M.: My book is the only project I am working on now. It is out on Moloko+, a small independent publisher that cannot invest in any marketing activities. So, in the last weeks I was busy editing a dozen of short film teasers with me reading excerpts of my texts. Fortunately, my 24-year-old nephew helped me to set up an Instagram account to weekly post a new reel, the same on YouTube and on my homepage maeck.net. I had to use my Facebook account to spread the news, my only activity on that creepy platform. And to my surprise I received quite a bunch of likes and comments, including some personal messages of spirited readers.

I did not want to write a biography, even though there was so much material lying around. I got the old stuff out again, compiled my conversations with William Burroughs, found the very first [Einstürzende] Neubauten interview and took the opportunity to write autobiographical outlines apropos my punk period and the making of Decoder, and while I was at it, I puffed up the notes from my world travels a bit and worked through my pain-induced mood swings. The title of the book I only found by chance, at a flea market in Mexico: Full Throttle into Ruin. It was on the cover of a bootleg DVD of the film Head On which I produced in 2004 with Fatih Akin, a slang translation of the original German title Gegen die Wand.

by Christophe Becker

Et Satan fait danser les pierres… — Boris Vian, Le Chevalier de neige, 1953

Christophe Becker: Last time you and I talked, we discussed the movie Decoder, Genesis P-Orridge and William S. Burroughs. You mentioned the Rip Off punk store. Can you tell me when you first discovered punk music, and what bands or artists you listened to at the time in Hamburg?

Klaus Maeck: I discovered punk music two years after it hit London. Hamburg is quite close to London, there was a ferry going every two days. We often went there. It was cheaper than flying, now it’s the other way around and there’s no more ferry. It happened around 1978 really, when I was working as a taxi driver. I was part of the alternative, autonomous movement. “Non-dogmatic,” we called ourselves. There were a lot of communists around, and militant fractions like the RAF. The 70s were quite busy. But we weren’t following any party line. Punk exploded around that time. Friends in my neighborhood didn’t really understand it. I thought it was kind of a revolution, because it was a revolution — at least for the music industry or for the music culture and subculture. We grew apart because I was going to London, and not really catching any good bands, but that’s when I started to listen to punk music. In Germany it was all a copy of English punk really. Singing in English, trying to copy people’s favorite bands. Only a little later, in 1979 or 1980, German bands started singing in German and finding their own style and identity. Hamburg was known for this hardcore punk. I was listening to the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols were my favorite band, or The Clash.

CB: Did you have the opportunity to see them in concert?

KM: Not the Sex Pistols. I had a ticket for their first Hamburg show, but they split a week or so before coming. I never saw them. But I saw The Clash during one of their early concerts in Hamburg. It was quite an experience. Of course, a little later, in 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten started playing and I didn’t see their first concert in Berlin but in Hamburg, which was quite an exciting event because they played last in a punk / new music festival with very different bands, punk bands, experimental bands, and, like I mentioned before, the Hamburg audience was quite rough. I guess it was our intention because I was also co-organizing the event. I just wanted to show the variety of music happening in Germany. Einstürzende Neubauten was playing in front of fifty people. Most of the people left because there were some fights going on. This concert stuck in everybody’s mind who saw it at that time, these fifty people, I’m very sure. So they became my favorite band.

CB: You say you organized or co-organized these events?

KM: Driving a taxi, I met Alfred Hilsberg. He was sitting in the back of the vehicle, talking to someone, mentioning punk. He was involved, or writing about it. Also he was starting, or planning to do an exhibition about twenty-five years of Rock ‘n’ Roll. This was the twenty-fifth anniversary, I believe it was in 1979. At that time, I was working with a friend on a self-made underground magazine. There was no fanzine then. It was called Cooly Lully Revue. The subtitle was: “A magazine for the radical joy of life.” A crazy magazine about UFOs, we also published political articles… I had the second issue in my taxi. This is where I published the first interview with Johnny Rotten in Germany… which I made up. (laughter) Because I couldn’t reach him. I actually tried to, I had his phone number, well I believed I had his phone number being in London. I even believe until today that he spoke to me because somebody just shouted on the phone “FUCK OFF!”. It might have been him, I don’t know.

CB: (laughter) It might have been. Sounds like him all-right.

KM: So I invented that interview, writing it, copying English interviews. I was well… fascinated.

CB: (laughter) So you’ll never know whether you talked to Johnny Rotten or not.

KM: No… I saw him later, much later, some years ago, playing with Public Image… Anyway, Alfred Hilsberg was organizing this exhibition and, since I gave him my magazine and he saw that I was interested in music, he asked me to help him find books about music and the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll so that I could sell them there.

There were no books about punk yet, not even the first fanzines, but some magazines, I believe. That’s when I started, helping Alfred Hilsberg on this first exhibition. And when that exhibition was finished the idea came up to open a store with the magazines that hadn’t been sold. I was buying badges cheaply in London, selling them here at the first punk concerts. We had no records, only badges and magazines. Soon, we had the first vinyls from London. It was all so fast, the first German independent records were pressed… At first, as you can imagine, there was not so much to buy — it was more of a hangout for punks. In daytime there was no real place for them to rub shoulders so it soon became their meeting point. By the time, more and more records came in, and it turned into a real record store. We had artists in general. Painters, writers, journalists, they all met in the same place. When I say writers, journalists, we were all starting to be. There was no clan. It was the right time. It was four years, from 1979 to 1983. Four very fast years. After the first year already, I think in 1980 or 1981, other record stores opened in Germany. All at once, all at the same time in Berlin, in Dusseldorf, in Munich… Some of them asked for the records we had. I was working with Alfred, he was heading the ZickZack label, publishing lots of singles and first albums. We soon began to exchange records, or to distribute. In 1981, we were distributing independently for lots of German labels. You see how fast it grew in two years.

CB: What sort of customers did you have at the time?

KM: Well, music fans. I miss the times, you know, when we went to record stores every week to see what new releases would be available. If that new release from that band would already be there. Just being curious. We would listen to the music in the store. The customers…? We had very young people who wanted to buy badges. Badges became very fashionable. The audience also became younger. We mostly had music fans. Many people told me later they were afraid to come into the store because… I guess they saw so many leather jackets and associated them with rockers and violence, which, you know, never happened inside the store but outside. We even had to close it at some point, and move it, because neighbors were complaining too much. We were not only selling punk records but every sort of new music; I hate the word “new wave,” but all the new music that came out then.

CB: Was there any pressure of any kind… Any form of censorship? Were you absolutely free to express yourself, or sell what you wanted to?

KM: We were mostly free, but… There was this Hamburg band called Slime, and I believe it was their first record. Slime were one of the bands who would drop by the store and give some records “in commission,” as they say. They would come by a week or a month later to collect the money for the records we had sold. I was invited by the police, by the political police, I had to go because I was selling records with political statements to destroy Germany, in short. They asked me if I knew these people, if I knew names etc. Because the record was not allowed to be distributed. But this was basically the only case. I could say “I don’t know them, people dropped by the store, brought records and then came by again, that’s how we do it.” I mentioned at some point we had to move the store, we heard that the Hamburg council tried to prevent our moving to a new neighborhood: they said it was already full of homeless people, they said it was poor enough. But they couldn’t stop us from opening the store.

CB: Did you consider punk as a political movement?

KM: For me it was. It was all very naive, of course: “Kill the police,” “kill the pigs.” But having been educated and having lived in the 70s, the militant groups fought against a police state. It was much more black-and-white at the time. I saw the movement in general was a very political movement by just stating, or showing, that people could organize themselves without any big record companies, global or national structures, or parties. Maybe it was a continuation of the hippie conception of freedom, of an alternate movement. People tried. They tried to grow their own food, to work in collectives, to barter. We didn’t want to make money when we started the record store. It was a fun project, but we had to make a living. It was the first time I could live off my work.

CB: Organization is one of the major themes in Decoder. It’s always been an important topic to you… Were you familiar with radical political publications like Konkret, articles published by Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Röhl or Peter Rühmkorf?

KM: Yes, Konkret. I was familiar with it. Ulrike Meinhof’s articles. Klaus Röhl, Peter Rühmkorf not so much. I wasn’t a steady reader of Konkret, but it was a very important publication. There weren’t so many left-wing publications at that point. We also worked on our own publication at the time. It was still the era of thermopaper, and some machines we used in school. Of course there were printers. We printed magazines, very simple ones. To publish texts by Ulrike Meinhof, for example. Or even the Red Army Fraction. Not because we were in favor of them, but we were for the publication of their articles. We believed anyone should be able to say or publish anything in a democracy. Obviously, these statements were never printed in the media so it was kind of a counter publicity.

CB: It was mostly Ulrike Meinhof then?

KM: Yes, because she was quite somebody. Having worked as a social worker, being very smart. She was an intellectual turning into a terrorist… I assume she was the most intelligent member of the gang. It’s not that I was a fan of Ulrike Meinhof. She was one of the prominent names of counterculture. Klaus Röhl and Peter Rühmkorf were more on the intellectual, academic level.

CB: Last time we talked you mentioned that movie by Uli Edel, Die Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo [1978]. He directed a movie some time ago about Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Fraction [Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 2008]. The movie was pretty much trashed when it was released.

KM: There are two perspectives. Having lived through the time, having known people who knew people who, themselves, knew people… It was a community, it was easy to know someone involved… It was interesting to see the film recounting the story of the Baader Meinhof gang in ninety minutes. It was a commercial tv project. You couldn’t express any depth or criticism in such a commercial film and nobody would have expected that of Uli Edel who’s a handyman. He’s not a very artistic or valuable director in my opinion. But he knows his job and how to do such a film. It was interesting to see it as a document of the time, but not more than that.

CB: To come back to punk music and Rip Off, did you choose to support or promote certain punk bands?

KM: Yes, but the word “choose” is not right. It happened (laughter). Like opening that Rip Off store. I was friends with Frank Z., who was the singer of Abwärts. Abwärts was one of the first German punk bands. They were two to four years older than most of the punks. We were already in our early twenties. We were twenty-two or something. How old was I…? I was twenty-five in ’79. Let’s say we were five years older, and Frank was the same, but punks were rather sixteen, eighteen or twenty. Abwärts jumped the train with the punk attitude. But they did that very well, they were a very nice rock band.

They met in the store and made plans and finally recorded an album. I was kind of their sound-mixer on live gigs and their manager, but it was all very small, just trying to organize a record, a tour, an album. It just happened. And when Abwärts got really good friends with Einstürzende Neubauten, two members of Abwärts left to play with Neubauten, like Mark Chung and FM Einheit. This was the band I worked with for many years, even decades later.

In the late 80s, when Rip Off was bankrupt and I was being chased by financiers and government officials to pay money I didn’t have, I went to West Berlin which was still a good place for exile because it was not connected to West Germany. In Hamburg I couldn’t have a car, I couldn’t have a telephone, I couldn’t have a bank account etc. Because of my bankruptcy. While in Berlin everything was possible, life was a bit easier there. I was working on a book about Neubauten, Listen with Pain, and later, in the early ’90s, I made a documentary called Liebeslieder: Einstürzende Neubauten [1993] about the first thirteen years of the band, with lots of music, footage and interviews. After that I really wanted to stop. I don’t want to be the life-long biographer of Neubauten. I became their manager because they needed one. We worked together for another ten years, until 2003 or something. So yes, Abwärts and Einstürzende Neubauten were bands I worked with the most.

CB: Rip Off finally closed and you were bankrupt.

KM: Yes. Was it 1993, or 1994? In those days, the record industry needed that long to finally realize there was a serious new music movement which they could exploit as well. So this was the “Neue Deutsche Welle,” the new German rage, starting only around, I guess, 1983, with bands that were put together artificially to fit together. Artificial bands, songs written by someone else but in German and hitting the trend. This was quite a big marketing event, a new German wave. We never had any money for marketing, it was a self-going business for people who were interested. We were kind of run over by the record industry, because suddenly the new wave was something else… It didn’t have anything to do with new music. It was just exploiting a trend, but it also harmed the independent scene; without notice our records did not sell as well as before. Plus, we were naïve and didn’t know anything about selling. We were unsuspecting when it came to taxes. It was like a chain-reaction. The store went bankrupt, all the labels went bankrupt on account of our being dependent on each-other.

Labels could not produce anymore, records could not sell anymore. In 1984 I had to go to court and say: “I own nothing and I don’t have any money,” so they would leave us alone for seven years. That’s how long it took. I was in debts, something between fifty and a hundred-thousand Deutschmarks. I was in my mid-twenties. I thought I would never be able to pay that money back again.

C. B.: Last time we talked you mentioned the magazine Gasolin 23.

KM: There was a big coincidence. We worked on the first album of Abwärts. We called it “Amok Koma.” “Koma” is “Amok” backwards. I knew some of the publishers of Gasolin. Before punk I was interested in German underground or subculture writers. Around the record store there was the best book store I ever knew, called Welt Buchhandlung, “world bookshop.” They had every booklet or book coming from every independent writer and publisher — especially the underground press. There was more going on in the ’70s than there is now. There is no underground today. I’m sure I knew Gasolin because I read some of the writers. And around the same time, we were working on the Abwärts album “Amok Koma,” they published an anthology called “Amok Koma.” We hadn’t been in touch. It was a real coincidence that people in Hamburg and people in Frankfort had the same title idea at the same time, and that’s how we came into contact. Later I wrote something for Gasolin. I became friend with the publishers and some of the writers.

C. B.: Can you give me examples of writers who were significant to you. I know that obviously William Burroughs was a major influence.

KM: One of the editors and writers of Gasolin was Jürgen Ploog who was also a friend of Burroughs and wrote books about him and until today is publishing his non-readable cut-up stories. He was a pilot for Lufthansa for a long time. He always travelled in time and space. He was always travelling in-between worlds. He keeps up that cut-up feeling of not being in one place but in many places at the same time [Ploog died May, 19, 2020 in Frankfurt]. Jürgen Ploog is not a very successful writer because, as I said, he’s very hard to read. Another name is Walter Hartmann, who was more responsible for the design and layout of Gasolin 23, lots and lots of book covers and illustrations.

C. B.: Do you believe that, today, the punk scene is entirely dead?

KM: Yes, I think so (laughter). As you know yourself punk became a fashion very fast. What is punk today? It’s a music style. But punk, as I saw it as a movement, is dead. There are other movements, new movements. Punk was ’80s. Do you think different? I’m curious.

C. B.: The answer would have been different a few years ago. I still think that a band like The Fall was great even after the ’70s. Bands like Wire, they do an entirely different sort of music now, and I trust it’s wonderful and different.

KM: I agree with the bands you mentioned, but I wouldn’t call them punk. Obviously, some of the more interesting bands are still doing things. The Fall, not anymore now [their leader Mark E. Smith died January, 24, 2018]. Lots of punk bands play their old songs. They realize it’s one of the few ways they can make a little money. They make good songs, but I don’t expect any new ideas.

Acknowledgments

Klaus Maeck, Clémentine Hougue, Noëlle Batt, Oliver Harris.

by Christophe Becker

Moi qui comptais déconner jusqu’à l’article de la mort. — Samuel Beckett, Eleutheria

I never knew who Klaus Maeck was. Even when I was finishing my PhD on the influence of William S. Burroughs on William Gibson and Genesis P-Orridge in 2010. The man seemed to be completely off the radar. It took some time — and a great deal of luck — to stumble upon the movie Decoder he’d co-directed with Muscha, Volker Schäfer and Trini Trimpop. A movie starring non other than William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge. A wonderful film and a miracle of some sort.

Klaus Maeck, along with Muscha, Schäfer and Trimpop, used Burroughs’ sound theories and gleefully put them on screen. A cyberpunk world where revolutionaries and wild boys used sound to disturb the status quo, to fight the good fight and destroy the police state. This interview is part of a much longer work entitled “The Electronic Revolution will not be televised. Le « son Burroughs » dans le film Decoder (1984),” published this year.

Decoder is now available on DVD and Bluray thanks to Vinegar Syndrome.

Christophe Becker: What is your first memory of William S. Burroughs (as a reader, as an individual)?

Klaus Maeck: It was in the mid 1970s. I read some of his texts in American and German underground magazines like Gasolin 23. I was impressed by his view of the world, his language. Then the German publishers Udo Breger and Pociao published the book The Electronic Revolution — way ahead of the electronic revolution that was yet to come — with essays and manuals to interfere with mainstream structures… This was my bible for a time, together with Daniel Odier’s interview book The Job. I only read William Burroughs’ novels later and maybe I didn’t understand half of what he wrote. But somehow — I could feel it. That was quite a strong experience, to realize what language can do. That it can blow you away.

CB: Among the films you directed or produced, two of them involve William S. Burroughs: Decoder (1984) and Commissioner of Sewers (1991). Can you explain his impact on your work?

KM: Burroughs’ perspectives on society and art inspired me so much that I started to write and record and film and to cut it all up. At that time, we had quite violent encounters with the police and other state troops due to our resistance against nuclear powerplants and due to our furtive sympathy for German radicals like 2 June Movement or the Rote Armee Fraktion. What I decided was not to fight physically against the superior powers of global Goliaths but — if I wanted to change anything about the corrupt structures of Western civilization or at least make people aware of them — I would rather take the subtle way by using the new media options like tape recorders, video, and film. One of the ideas was the script for Decoder. And after a personal visit to Lawrence, Kansas, I asked Burroughs if he would play a small but kind of “key” role himself in my first feature film — which he luckily did. For a bottle of vodka.

CB: Can you explain why Muscha is credited as the sole director while you’re credited as producer?

KM: Easy: films almost always have one director. Although we started as a collective and produced this film together — from editing the script, preparing and filming and editing — there comes a point in time when you need a poster and credits. A film by four people? How can it work? Well, to be honest, it didn’t. Although we planned to do it all together Muscha was the one with a stronger visual concept and very soon after starting to shoot we accepted his role as a director. So the poster says. But I really see Decoder as a team work — as all films are! However, as I was the one who started the project and being today the only one left of that team to take care of this film, to keep it alive, I do see it as my film. Whatever — it’s a credit, I don’t care too much. I just care for the film, and I love the fact that it had a kind of revival over the last few years and people are curious to know more — like you.

CB: How was the title Decoder chosen?

KM: The working title of my script was “Burger Krieg.” A mixture of English and German and if you pronounce “Burger” as you do in English, it sounds very similar to the German word “Bürger” which means “citizen,” however “Bürgerkrieg” means “civil war.” After finishing the script we found a better name, we were not happy — too much “Burger” (H-Burger) in the title… Because the film really is about decoding muzak and other codes. Not sure anymore who came up with the name, but we all knew instantly it was our choice.

CB: When and where did you first meet Genesis P-Orridge and F. M. Einheit?

KM: F. M. Einheit was coming into my punk store Rip Off around 79/80, coming from provincial Bochum to Hamburg looking for action. He searched for a band which would be different from all the boring rock bands at the time — and found the musicians around Frank Z. — so they formed Abwärts, one of Hamburg’s first punk bands. Not much later we lived together — 6 people in a 6-room-commune in St. Pauli. My room was next to Frank Z.’s, then came F. M. Einheit, Christiane F., Anja Huwe from X Mal Deutschland and others. A commune of musicians, more or less. And when musician friends played in town — such as Einstürzende Neubauten or Psychic TV or others — they had a place to stay or sleep. That’s the way I met Genesis, in my room. I remember asking him why he would suggest wearing uniforms like they did at the time and following their rituals… and he said it was a game. Let’s see where it leads. Well, we saw… However, I told him about my idea for Decoder and that I would love him to play in it, actually he should play himself. A cult leader. He liked the idea and joined the project. In fact he helped us a lot. Organizing the location in London to shoot the scene with Burroughs during the Final Academy in Brixton, asking Sleazy to organize equipment and be the camera operator. And inventing his own dialogue lines which are maybe the most important in the film: “Information is like a bank. Some people are poor, some people are rich with information. We have to rob this bank…” — he said that when we filmed in winter 1982! How weird that I will use that excerpt from the film in my new documentary about the German hackers from Chaos Computer Club who are following and proposing this rule since then actually.

CB: Funny you should mention the Chaos Computer Club and hackers. A few years later Hans Hübner (Pengo) would be arrested in Germany. As a hacker he was influenced by William Gibson who is an avid Burroughs reader to this day.

KM: Well, well… Wasn’t he the one who called himself Hagbard Celine after the Illuminatus Trilogy by R. A. Wilson? Gibson and Burroughs — of course there is a connection — but I would not draw the line to Pengo and the CCC.

CB: How were the cast of Decoder chosen?

KM: As you can imagine from the above answer, we took it as it came. F. M. Einheit was living with us in St. Pauli, he just had joined Einstürzende Neubauten. He was the sound hacker par excellence. He only needed to play himself. Christiane F. lived with us, being a well-known book author at the time (Die Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, 1978). She was clean at the time and looking for a place to start a new life. Her other identity was the famous junkie being written about and her book being made into a film starring David Bowie… She was in the press and at the same time looking for hideouts. That gave us the idea for her role in Decoder — she played the double identity of a peep show girl and someone who preferred frogs to humans.

More cast? Ralf Richter, the assistant of Bill Rice, is actually the brother of F. M. Einheit and a real actor. One of the few real actors in the film. And Bill Rice? This great off-theatre actor from New York we saw in the underground movies from NYC at the time, like Subway Riders and others. A movie by Amos Poe, photography by Johanna Heer, an Austrian camera director whose lighting was very special, very extreme, we all loved it. When we asked her to shoot and light our movie we also asked her to bring Bill Rice. And she did!

CB: What were the initial reactions at the Berlin Film Festival in Feb., 1984?

KM: Not good. The reviews were bad — the film critics did not understand (easy to say now)… Surely it was a very non-conventional film, not having a straight storyline. Or one which was not easy to follow. We ourselves realized at that point that making a film with four people (who all wanted to have a say, who all wanted to put in their ideas) was not the best idea. We could have made four films out of it, maybe. Anyway, because of this poor reaction we didn’t find a distributor and got stuck, there was no cinema release until 1986. And that only happened because I found a one-man-distribution-company in Berlin and this guy was smart. We applied for more funding to support the distribution for the film, and with this money he engaged and paid me for some months to promote the film and organize cinemas to play Decoder for a week. It did not go well though, but as I already realized international festivals were interested in the film. People in Milan, Los Angeles and elsewhere organized screenings, I was happy that the film had at least some impact outside of Germany. Especially in Italy, the USA and Japan, weird, isn’t it?

CB: You use Burroughs’ voice as taken from Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1959-1980). What was your reaction to the record?

KM: I loved it!

CB: Did Burroughs’ work and theories change your way of filming and editing? Were you familiar at the time with Antony Balch’s work like Towers Open Fire (1964)? If so, did it influence the shooting and / or editing of Decoder?

KM: Yes, I knew all these films. As I mentioned before, I experimented a lot with cutting up film and sound, but I wasn’t happy with the results — at least not for a wider audience. Of course, Burroughs’ and Balch’s work influenced the way of editing the film — and before that in editing and writing the script in a non-linear way. You see what critics thought of that, see above. However, we were quite happy with the result and also the effects of the film when it came out. We only wished that more people would understand what it was all about. After that experience I decided to try and make more approachable films rather than pieces of art.

CB: Music and riots seem to pop up frequently in your work. New Order’s Singularity video co-directed with Jörg A. Hoppe and Heiko Lange comes to mind.

KM: The film B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989 was written, produced and directed by Jörg A. Hoppe and Heiko Lange and myself and — simple answer — we used excerpts of Decoder. And the New Order video used excerpts of B-Movie!

The Contributors

Klaus Maeck was born on July, 28, 1954, Hamburg, Germany. He’s a producer, script-writer and director. He co-directed Decoder in 1984 and directed the documentary William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers in 1991. Among his other movies: Liebeslieder: Einstürzende Neubauten (1993) and B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989 (2015).

Christophe Becker was born on October, 16, 1975, Paris, France. After a Phd on the influence of William S. Burroughs on William Gibson and Genesis P-Orridge, he now works on experimental literature, science-fiction (Karel Čapek, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson) and the French punk scene.

Acknowlegements

Klaus Maeck for being so patient, Clémentine Hougue, Noëlle Batt, Oliver Harris, Peggy Pacini